The Roots of MacOSX

Steve was drawing things out, as he is wont to do. We’d seen demonstrations by Adobe, we got to see the iBook’s new larger look, he’d prattled on and on about the virtues of iPhoto, we were getting restless. We wanted to see IT. Whatever Steve Jobs had up the sleeve of that black mock-neck we wanted to see it. In all fairness those of us that are rabid weblog addicts had already seen it. Slashdot had broken the news the night before when ‘Time Canada’ plastered it all over their website. It was the new iMac, and inside the ‘reality distortion field’ that Steve Jobs projects at every MacWorld keynote, it was insanely great.

Editorial notice: All opinions are those of the author and not necessarily those of osnews.com

The introduction of the new iMac was a huge event for Apple. After all, at its heart Apple is a hardware company, focused on selling cool boxes of silicon to comsumers. The introduction of Apple’s new operating system, Mac OS X, in many ways will have a more lasting impression on the computing world’s landscape. When IT people look at their landscape they don’t see the huge lamp-shaped shrine to the new iMac, they see the past, transmuted into a stylish, Jobsian vision of the future.

OS X began to trickle out to the public in 2000. Officially that’s pronounced OS ten, but as you’ll see that X has more connotations than the roman numeral. OS X was touted as being based on UNIX, and inheriting some of the technology acquired from the NeXT buyout. In reality, it’s a fair assessment to call it NEXTSTEP 5. As if caught in some freak transporter accident where two entities are fused into one it appeared that the old, archaic Mac OS and NeXT had fused to become Mac OS X.

Steve Jobs was forced out of Apple in the late 1980s when his managerial style clashed with that of then CEO John Sculley and others in Apple’s management. It was a bitter departure, with Jobs quickly founding NeXT Inc. Hoping to repeat his success with the Macintosh Jobs brought the NeXT Cube to the world, but the world wasn’t listening. NeXT was perhaps ahead of its time. The object oriented programing paradigm was different from Mac to be sure, and the adoption of UNIX at its core appealed to the monkish UNIX crowd, but it was lost on the Mac faithful that Jobs knew how to market to. NeXT was also overpriced, costing more than twice that of a decent PC or Mac at the time. NeXT floundered, eventually dropping its hardware component and became a purely software company.

The computing world had all but written off NeXT when Apple bought it in 1996. Apple was in trouble. It had been attempting to update the Mac OS for years, with a string of code name projects, such as Copland and Rhapsody, all of which were stillborn. In the meantime Microsoft had managed to catch, and then surpass Mac in the OS race with Windows 95 and NT. Apple needed to acquire the technology that it had been unable to produce on its own or it would diminish into a bit player, and eventually into the computer platform graveyard with Amiga and Commodore. Enter NeXT.

NeXT, and by inheritance Mac OS X, is at its base almost as old as the original Mac OS. Indeed, with its UNIX roots it can be argued that OS X is actually older than MacOS Classic. OS X can trace its roots back through FreeBSD, through BSD UNIX, and eventually back to Bell Labs and the birth of UNIX. Something important had changed though since Steve Jobs tried to market NeXT in the late eighties, UNIX had gotten hip, thanks to a computer science student in Finland, Linus Torvalds.

The ’90s saw the birth, growth, and then explosion of Linux, the operating system that Torvalds created and set free onto the unsuspecting Internet. A new generation of geeks and compsci students flocked to the idea of owning their very own UNIX system, tweaking, playing, creating. The quickly evolving Internet enabled gaggles of programmers to collaborate on the new operating system. Linux evolved from a study project into a fully-featured operating system at an unprecedented rate. Suddenly the cool place to be was running Linux.

However, Linux was pretty much a niche OS for use by knowledgeable digerati. It excelled in running the servers that were needed to quench the hunger of the exponential growth of the World Wide Web. As desktop system for average users however it was clunky and intimidating. Linux, and UNIX, was powerful, that much at least had filtered through to the public via the media. It was in front of the back drop of the Internet revolution, the heady days of the late ’90s, when every computer dweeb worth his salt claimed to be running Linux at home that Apple and Steve Jobs announced Mac OS X.

Jobs had primed the pump with success such as the iMac and a departure from the beige boxes that plagued Apple in his absence. Apple was hip again, out of Wal-Mart and into The Sharper Image. Now Jobs combined great hardware with great new software that, amazingly had the same roots as the golden child of the moment, Linux. Linux on an iMac, what could be more insanely great than that?

Mac OS X can still run applications written for the older Mac OS in what is called ‘Classic Mode’. This is little more than a very slick Mac OS Emulator written inside OS X. When you start the Classic Environment you even see the old Mac OS startup screen, with the ever familiar smiley face. Apple has also provided libraries that allow specially modified programs to run natively in Mac OS X. The process, called Carbonizing, after the name of the supporting libraries, is only an interim solution though. What Apple really wants is for developers to use their ‘new’ Cocoa environment.

The funny thing though is that at its base the Cocoa environment is, you guessed it, NeXT. Even the library names give the charade away. NSDocument, a base library in Cocoa, stands for NEXTSTEP Document. Cocoa is a pretty slick environment to work in. It’s possible to whip up a simple text editor in minutes and the proliferation of developers out there adopting Cocoa and creating applications for the ‘new’ Operating System is growing quickly. One only need look at software announcement websites, such as www.versiontracker.com, to see this.

At its heart Mac OS X is a descendant of FreeBSD. The Apple engineers used FreeBSD as a blueprint for OS X, however there are differences at the heart of the OS. At the very heart, the OS X kernel is based on the Mach project at Carnegie Mellon University. However where most UNIX people interact with the system, at the shell, Mac OS X greatly resembles a BSD-based UNIX, albeit with a few Apple twists.

Within weeks of the release of the OS X Public Beta people began to port applications to the new OS. Because of Apple’s shaky relationship with the GNU folks Mac OS X ships with almost no GPL code, though the developer tools do have the GNU C Compiler at their core. Most UNIX users make use of at least a few GNU tools, and work porting these apps began quickly. To be fair to Apple, many tools could be compiled as is, without any tweaking of the code required. The porting initiative has bloomed in the wake of OS X, sprouting such projects as Fink, which is porting many many UNIX and Linux apps to OS X, and MacGIMP, a port of the popular free Photoshop-grade graphics tool.

By the time Apple released Mac OS X 10.1 in August 2001 there was a quiet buzz taking off in the UNIX and Linux community about Apple’s new/old OS. Apple did a very smart thing when it released the 10.1 update, they gave it away. What may have otherwise been an upgrade, such as Windows 98SE, Apple gave away to anyone who stopped by an Apple retailer. 10.1 was a major upgrade in performance. With 10.1 many people started using OS X as their primary OS, and interestingly it began to gain converts in the UNIX world.

UNIX System Administrators and programmers are monkish curmudgeons more often resembling Ted Kaczynski than the hip designers and artists that have been Apple’s core clientele. However as the buzz around OS X took wing UNIX people quickly snatched up PowerBooks, iBooks, anything to be able to communicate with the business world while keeping their familiar UNIX.

This is where some of Apple’s future lies. To be sure Apple will continue as a consumer computer manufacturer. It has spent the last two years preparing the Mac faithful for the conversion away from their old trusty OS and will most likely continue to bottle-feed the newly converted for the next two years as well. However if Apple is to grow into markets beyond their core they need to capture mindshare in those other markets. The UNIX and Linux market just happen to be an easy sell for Apple.

About the Author:Gary Rogers is a system administrator who survived the Internet boom (and bust). He has administered most major UNIX distributions as well as Windows NT/2000. He has been swallowed by Steve Jobs’s Reality Distortion Field(tm) and is now a Mactivist extolling the virtues of OS X to any UNIX person that he can get to listen. You can reach him for comment at gary_rogers@mac.com.

32 Comments

2002-02-22 4:34 am

G4.. “““

2002-02-22 4:36 am

They let anything onto OSNews these days…

2002-02-22 4:51 am

Actually, the Rhapsody project started after the acquisition of NEXT. It was basically OpenStep 4.2 with a Macintosh look on it. It ran on Intel machines and PPC, but never made it farther than Developer Release 2 (DR2) on Intel. The PPC version went on to become Mac OS X Server 1.0.

2002-02-22 5:20 am

I enjoyed your article very much, Gary. I really hope that Mac OS X takes off in a big way in the UNIX world. My only fear is that its growth will be stunted because of certain geeks’ dislike of Apple hardware (which is mainly based on myths, IMHO). There nothing really that can be done about that, other than if Apple really makes a good hardware-related marketing push towards the UNIX crowd. Showing “Say Hello to iLamp, whoops, I mean iMac” ads to UNIX gurus isn’t going to get Apple very far (and I’m saying this as someone who personally thinks the new iMac is incredible and has one on order!).

The flip side is that many long-time classic Mac OS are scared s**tless over Mac OS X being based on UNIX. To them, UNIX=arcane-geek-land, and they want no part of it. Command line=hellfire to a “true blue” Mac user. Apple’s going to have to do a better job of educating and supporting those users in the coming months if they want to see mass migrations to OS X.

Then there are the people like myself who are former Windows users that have switched to the Mac because of Mac OS X’s great interface and application quality. These are the people that Apple’s targeting the most right now, and I think their marketing strategies and retail stores are really working in that department. OS X’s UNIXness doesn’t hurt there, either.

Ta ta,

Jared <– another RDF victim

2002-02-22 9:04 am

I just hope that I now reached the end of my way. It started with a C64-> Amiga-> Archimedes->win PC->BeBox->Linux and now OS X. Now I’m really tired of all the OS/ Hardware switches and I hope that I didn’t have to switch again 😉

Thomas

2002-02-22 10:40 am

Hi, my name is Kevin, i’ve been reading osnews for a while now, actually the first time i post here (btw kudos on the site Eugenia).

I worked with mac OS X a couple of times, and frankly … i liked, verry much so. I worked with a lot of different UNIXes, the one i like the most is still AIX. That set aside, OS X is a beautifull blend of both worlds.

Some think of its gui as “ugly and bloated”, some think of it as “a work of art”. I personally tend to lean more to thinking of it as different (it looks nice anyway:), i like it.

Now comes my oppinion on how BSD is implemented, or should i say, how it is “accessible”.

– By default, the root user is disabled (so you’ll have to

sudo stuff which gets annoying)

– Startup scripts are a bit awckward to work with, but once

you understand them, they make a lot of sense.

– Filesystem is a bit outdated IMHO.

– GFX performance has gotten a lot better, but still jerky

at scrolling sometimes.

– MemoryManagement is pretty good (sure a lot better then

the classic MacOS:)

– The shell is nice, especially for one feature, if you

make a typo in a command it will try to correct it and

proposes you the command that came the closest.

– Bootup time is a bit slow though for a *BSD system.

– GUI Latency in contrary to what most ppl say is fast,

waaaay faster then ever possible in XF86. Its the

drawing that sometimes slows down the “feel”.

– Generally the os “feels” pretty snappy on a G4 733 with

512 mb of ram 🙂 (not mine, my boss’s)

– Ease Of Use is still typicaly mac like (although it got a

bit bloaty on some points)

I must say, my boss feared mac OS X a bit. Because he got a bit “cared” when he saw me working on the CLI. It took a bit of convincing to make him see how it works. After a few hours he was happilly clicking away without even knowing that beneath lies the elegantly powerfull BSD UNIX that i’ve come to love.

I use FreeBSD on a daily basis @ home. I don’t dare say that it is “better” than any other *NIX implementation (yes, implementaion, not “distro”) out there. But i just like it for the simple fact that it is so clean. I really like the ports system, which is IMHO a work of art.

I just think it is wonderfull that mac users (i dont have the money to buy a g4 or g3) can now inherit all the UNIX legacy, fought and thought so hard for by so many people.

my 2c

PS : I did not want to start a discussion on which os is

better, but which os is best designed for its intended

usage.

For any comments you can reach me at kevin(at)netfusion(dot)be

Take Care

Kevin

2002-02-22 3:18 pm

… to create a free clone of it

until now we have only had windows to look up to (come on, mac classic doesnt even have VM) in the UI field. now that OSX has pushed the standard up i hope we can see free desktop environments adopting more of the same technologies that make OSX so “user-friendly”

(should that be “eye-candy-friendly”?)

2002-02-22 4:16 pm

>now that OSX has pushed the standard up…

i realy like OS 10 .. and if by some chance a G4 happend to end up on my desk i would be fine with that. however i am not sure what standard they pushed up, that someones else hasn’t already pushed farther.

From a users stand point, the preformance is (the last time i had a chance to mess with it) not so great. ui should never lag, that got to be the ugliest thing ever, windows does this on a consitant basis, its part of thier ‘way’.

As a developer, i am not a fan of they gui api, i think they could have done a better job.

looking around my room i find however that my opinions are probably verry skewed and off center, as all i see are three x86 boxes running BeOS.

2002-02-22 4:17 pm

That is a verry good point, but it is taken from the regular user’s view. It indeed looks great, and off course i like the interface too.

But what i like the most is the marriage between two (before) totally different kinds or even markets.

and indeed i would want to see a free clone of it and see it ported to other archs (hp-pa and alpha would be nice:).

it is a great os, both sides of the mirror.

Take Care

Kevin

2002-02-22 4:38 pm

I wouldn’t know about the api, since i’m not really a developper (although i mess around with some source occasionally).

But as far as the standards go … could you assure me concistency between several unix systems oher then POSIX standards, heck they can’t even get linux straight, and there we are only talking of different distro’s …

You see, standards are a problem ! you are entirely right at that. but standards have always been a problem among unix systems. Tragic really.

On the other hand, if you were refferring to the consitency between the api’s themselves, the from what i have heard, the u are probably right.

Take Care

Kevin

2002-02-22 4:45 pm

…now if they could just get a decent G4 under $1000, I’d get a mac. Until then if I want to use OS X, I’ll just go to my roommate’s iMac G3/400/256. His iMac does a decent job at running OS X if you don’t run any apps, otherwise it gets real slow! He must not mind too much because he recently removed his OS 9 partition, and now runs OS X exclusively. His other box is a Athlon 650 running BeOS, which is rarely used right now due to a lack of ethernet cables long enough to reach our switch. Btw, I’m writing this on my Duron 700 BeBox, which also boots FreeBSD, OpenBSD, Debian GNU/Linux, and FreeDOS. I really have no favorite os other than I flat out detest any that come from a certain company in Redmond, Wa.

2002-02-22 5:09 pm

What app would I most like to see on MacOS X? Terminal Services Client for WinXP. This way I could have a Mac on my desk, and use it for my primary operating platform, but still get to a Windows box if I found I absolutely had to. I mean cummon, there’s an X Server right? Hmm… maybe I should just shut up and write one. Anyone have a MacOS X box I can borrow?

Jeremiah Bailey: I flat out detest any that come from a certain company in Redmond, Wa

I’m afraid I won’t be buying one unless I can assemble it myself from abundant bits n pieces bought at an asian computer market. It has to be *that* commodity. Really ticks me off that Apple charges so much for their hardware. That doesn’t sit well with me. No competition in the hardware space is always bad news for the buyer.

“This is where some of Apple’s future lies. To be sure Apple will continue as a consumer computer manufacturer. It has spent the last two years preparing the Mac faithful for the conversion away from their old trusty OS and will most likely continue to bottle-feed the newly converted for the next two years as well. However if Apple is to grow into markets beyond their core they need to capture mindshare in those other markets. The UNIX and Linux market just happen to be an easy sell for Apple.”

____________________________

I’d like to get solid figures on what this supposed interest from the UNIX/Linux crowd has done to market share. Until then, I’ll label it hype.

2002-02-22 5:24 pm

I am running OSX on an old iMac g3/333/384. Works great, everything is pretty smooth. The interface is awesome, and it is no slower than Windows… and my iMac doens’t even have direct hardware support!!

OSX is one of those OS’s that have SO MUCH potential that it would be a shame if nothing is done with it. I am currently looking at AppleScript Studio as a way to make lots of cool utilities to harness the UNIX aspects of OSX withina nice GUI shell 🙂

Oh yeah, and just to let everyone know, Cocoa rocks! I have programmed for win32 and linux…. take the best parts of the UNIX environment (Perl, Bash, etc.) and then make it super easy to manipulate and make a GUI through ASStudio and Cocoa… So much better than visual basic!!

2002-02-22 5:24 pm

I’m an avid Mac user, at home and the office. I also toy with BSD (NetBSD in particular) and I’ve come to appreciate it. And though I think it’s nice for Apple that Mac OS X may be attracting traditional UNIX users due to it’s Mach / BSD roots, I think the primary goal of OS X is really an update to the classic Mac OS, which certainly had / has it’s problems.

I’d rather see Mac OS X introduce new users to UNIX. I worry that UNIX is a market of cannibalization: various UNIX implementations fighting for the same tiny market share. If OS X can bring new users to the fold, then maybe it will benefit the UNIX market as a whole.

And the quiet little renegade nerd in me is just excited about the slight possibility that this could entail stealing market share from Microsoft.

Rob

2002-02-22 7:57 pm

I can separately choose:

– the motherboard (not that $3000 one)

– the hard disk

– the memory

– the chassis

– the power supply

– the dvd/cd-r/rw

– the cpu

– the graphic card

I don’t buy PC for price mainly, and no time soon for a few of the things above in Apple. Till then, I couldn’t care less about all that BSD OSX `elegance`. Apple’s uniform hardware monopoly is asfixiating. Clone them or stay niche. Better stay that way.

2002-02-22 8:04 pm

I’ve used Windows Terminal Services under MacOS X just fine with HobLink JWT. I’ve read of others using rdesktop as well, but that requires XFree86 to be started. BTW, If you use XFree86 under MacOS X, be sure to check out the OroborOSX wm.

2002-02-22 9:51 pm

I used OSX on my G4/400 for quite a while but after a while the Aqua interface started to wear me down, it’s too BIG even on 1280×1024 display (for a poweruser/programmer) Cocoa was very nice to program with, althought at times I prefer standard C for speed and more creative freedom.

Now I run YDL GNU/Linux on the G4 and it’s a lot more responsive than OS X and there is a lot better software for it. (Galeon, Evolution, plus a plethora of others that I use everyday)

I understand that OS X is smth like a front-end for Unix like OS, and it’s not very difficult to port it on Intel. And if it’ll be ported and as stable as console-based Linux ( X & Window Managers are so slow and looks some times realy ugly… )i think that peoples will have a choice about what OS to install. But for nowtimes desktop OS on Intel is stil Win2K….

2002-02-22 10:37 pm

I don’t understand the whining by people who refuse to use anything they can’t build piece by piece. I grew out of that particular fascination a VERY long time ago. It’s fun a few times… but eventually I came to the conclusion that I have more important things to do with my time.

I have no problem buying apple hardware (I do wish it was cheaper). I like getting something that just works. Give me options for the whiz bang new nvidia card, lots of memory and disk and I’m happy. Who cares what brand of power supply is in it. 🙂

I think that is the biggest barrier for apple to jump into the intel space. The sheer mountain of hardware they will need drivers for. They need to devise some way to leverage the gazillion of linux drivers out there…

There is one misleading part of the article – it implies that the Rhapsody project was before Apple acquired NeXt and that it never saw the light of day – the truth is Rhapsody was an early version of OS X without Carbon. Developer’s balked at being forced to rewrite everything in Cocoa for Rhapsody – even though Cocoa is very nice – so Apple added Carbon and renamed the project OS X.

2002-02-22 11:12 pm

The amazing thing about OS X is that it has converted my wife from a Mac OS 9 Photoshop/HTML designer to a full-blow command-line UNIX user. I accidentally pasted in the top of my email to her. I think I’ll go hide now…

2002-02-23 1:58 am

If you don’t choose which computer to buy based mainly on price, then what’s the problem? Apple makes high-quality, innovative hardware and charges accordingly. Their latest products are hardly any more expensive than Dell, Gateway, Compaq, HP, or any other top-tier PC OEMs. And some of your comments are from la-la land. What $3000 motherboard? You can buy a whole Dual 1GHz G4 system for $3000. That’s Apple’s most expensive computer (unless you BTO). The new high-end iMac model is a steal at $1799.

Apple doesn’t have a monopoly on hardware. Apple has a monopoly on *Mac* hardware. That’s understandable, considering Apple invented the Mac and that’s their only business. I mean, it makes sense that Volvo has a monopoly on Volvo cars. People buy Apple computers because they want to buy *Apple* computers. If you have a problem with that, then go use Windows or Linux or FreeBSD or whatever on your custom-built computers and good luck to you. If you aren’t interested in buying a Mac, nor are you interested in Mac OS X, then why are you posting comments on this article?

Jared

2002-02-23 12:49 pm

If you don’t choose which computer to buy based mainly on price, then what’s the problem?

——————

See, it’s not just price is it? It’s flexibility. It’s individuality. It’s the ability to choose the components you want, not the one-size-fits-all components Apple hands out, regardless of their inflated prices.

some people want MacOSX, but not the hardware *limitations* Apple dictates to their userbase. Why is that so difficult to understand? Macs have VERY little upgrade potential. You want a different case? Bad luck. You want a cheap CPU upgrade? Bad luck. You want a certain drive that…bad luck.

It goes on and on. That influences cost of ownership greatly, and it *matters*, regardless of any “Macs just work…why waste your time building..” reasoning. Home-built computers “just work” too. And people have a hell of a lot more flexibility there, and have a lot of options when it comes to customising their machines.

Why would anyone argue against choice and more upgrade potential in the Mac hardware market?

2002-02-23 1:08 pm

Rhapsody was the initial result of mating NeXTSTEP with MacOS and occured after the purchase of NeXT by Apple, not before. At that time, Carbon did not exist which meant major rewrite headaches for developers and Adobe was crippling the only other selling point of Cocoa (then the YelloBox), that is, licensing issues with Display Postrcipy, the drawing architecure for the then OSX. They wanted to charge a per-copy royalty for each YellowBox runtime deployed, whether it be for YellowBox on Windows, MacOS v.anything or Solaris. The solution was to bypass DGS altogether and move towards a homebrewe implementation of Display PDF as well as creating Carbon. The rest you all know. Just as an aside, has anyone actually used IRIX, Solaris or XF86 lately running any window-managers at all? As much as I loved the whole Linux and *BSD thing I was shocked at the poor performance of any UNIX under interactive tasks. I mean the machine can continue to serve up web pages with Apache running in the background while browsing and checking email, but the end response to the user of switching between windows under X-Window is pathetic to say the least.

2002-02-23 4:37 pm

Thankyou for a nice, enjoyable article regarding MacOSX! Excepr for the small time-warp regarding Rhapsody (which has been pointed out), classic can not be described as a emulator (since no translation takes place), rater a “wrapper” or embedded framework.

2002-02-23 6:52 pm

— some people want MacOSX, but not the hardware *limitations* Apple dictates to their userbase. Why is that so difficult to understand? —

In other words, you’re saying that some people want “Mac” OS X without the Mac. I understand what you’re saying completely, but your reasoning is flawed. The reason Mac OS X works so well is because of Apple’s control over both the hardware and the software. Mac OS X is built to run on Mac hardware. What you call limitations I call strengths. Apple killed off the idea of OS X running on x86 long ago both for business reasons *AND* technical reasons. Witness BeOS. A great OS with lousy hardware support. There are so many different configurations of x86 boxes out there that only Microsoft OSes or massively supported open source projects such as Linux can keep up. And even Linux is still missing LOTS of pieces of the hardware support pie.

— Macs have VERY little upgrade potential. You want a different case? Bad luck. —

Good luck. Apple makes some of the best cases around, unless you’re a super geek who wants 15 PCI slots and liquid nitrogen-cooled overclocked 5GHz Athlons.

— You want a cheap CPU upgrade? Bad luck. —

Well, OK, I wouldn’t mind better CPU upgrade paths. But, let’s face it – most people woefully underutilize the power of their computers at this point in time. Only professionals and gamers need gobs of cutting-edge hardware. Professionals have money to buy new systems every year or two. Gamers are better off with Windows PCs, or better yet, gaming consoles.

— You want a certain drive that…bad luck. —

Um, yeah? What certain drive that…? Ever hear of FIREWIRE?

— Why would anyone argue against choice and more upgrade potential in the Mac hardware market? —

I would argue against it. There’s already plenty of hardware choice in the Mac market, and any more brings the risk of Apple not being able to keep up with driver and software support. The reason Macs (particularly OS X-based Macs) are able to run so smoothly is because of the “limited” hardware on the market. I’d hate to see the outrageous incompatibility issues that rage on in the x86 market show up in the Mac market.

Again, I reiterate: if you don’t want to buy a Mac, don’t buy a Mac. The fact that you want Mac OS X, but on your own flawed terms, shows that you don’t really care about the quality of the product and the ease of use. Mac OS X has those qualities because of the hardware it runs on. Don’t kid yourself that Mac OS X running on some cheap hashed-together beige box made up of no-name Asian parts is going to work as well as Mac OS X running on a Dual 1GHz Quicksilver.

Jared

2002-02-23 8:01 pm

Copland was totally unrelated to Rhaposdy, and Rhapsody was basically just Mac OS X without a lot of key technologies like Classic, Quartz, etc.– it was still based on OPENSTEP.

2002-02-24 10:46 am

Jared,

I run one of those cheap no-name Asian computers and I build it myself. I don’t know how much I spend on it, but it wasn’t near that much than my future G4 system at “Apple Store” for $8000 CDN. I wish I could afford it. Even though the G4 has a faster CPU I can truly say no Apple computer could offer me the same what I have in my system and for that price I got it for. You wrote:

” But, let’s face it – most people woefully underutilize the power of their computers at this point in time.”

So it doesn’t matter if I have a dual athlon or a dual G4 at home. I mean, i underutilize the power anyway.

The drawback is, I have to run Windows, Beos or Linux. (how much did you spend for that nice silver box? Oh and you can’t get a cheaper one) I think the joke is on you. I am jealous at the nice designed box and OS X but thats about it. I can do the same work in windows with a 2,3 or 4 button mouse. (I believe they fixed it in OS X). Speaking of harddrives: you tell me how I can get a raid configuration with firewire. (didn’t do my research, but I don’t think it is possible)

I think “OpinionBoy” wanted to make a point of people want to choose and everybody should have the right to do so. I can’t understand why you are so ingnorand about it. I can say “I can plug a computer together”. A apple user who has never touched a pc probably can’t say that. Anyway, even though I have a cheaper Asian system I would love to install OS X on a pc. If Apple would decide to let people build their own systems i am the first guy to switch over. For now I have to run windows, but at least I can choose the hardware I want.

BTW: Watched an interresting documentary about Asain cars a couple of nights ago. Honda is as much north american as Chevy or Ford. So you might want to check your parts in your G4. You never know. But again you won’t be able to buy and change to a different brand.

Jean

2002-02-24 10:57 am

Another note. I did work for Nasa, BCTV, Chalktv, Hollinger Group. They didn’t mind that I use a Windows Machine.

That means you don’t need to have an Apple Computer to do good work.

2002-02-24 7:37 pm

In other words, you’re saying that some people want “Mac” OS X without the Mac. I understand what you’re saying completely, but your reasoning is flawed.

—————-

Jared,

I never said I wanted MacOSX without the Mac. I’m saying keep the Mac, but allow DIYers to build their own machines out of somewhat cheaper (if not cheap) Mac parts, such as CPUs and mainboards from mainboard manufacturers other than the ones Apple outsources to make their machines. (so yes, I’m saying Apple needs to license their designs out to other parts manufacturers…or at the very least get more flexible in their configurations). Their snobbery can only take them so far. (a good example is ATI getting OEMs to integrate their radeon chips…whereas in the past they used to make their video cards themselves…exclusively).

BTW, I found your ‘cheap Taiwanese beige box’ comment interesting. If you think Apple doesn’t get their machines made for them on the ‘cheap’ in Taiwan you’re sadly mistaken

I also happen to hate Apple’s cases and its perception of what is “cool”. I do like the new iMac though, but would never buy it simply because the monitor is grafted to the base (watch me sob in 2yrs when I want to use the monitor on a new machine) and because it houses only one optical drive, with the only options being ultra-expensive externals. I am aware of the higher-end machines, but again, I hate the cases, the prices, the options, etc.

So yes, I think I’m all for Mac, but some choice is what is needed, I think. I never said I wanted MacOSX on x86 hardware. I want x86 buyer flexibility on Mac hardware. Just the ability to buy a separate “approved” CPU, mainboard & case would do wonders, I think. (instead of a new machine…)

2002-02-26 3:07 am

…now if they could just get a decent G4 under $1000, I’d get a mac

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I’m afraid I won’t be buying one unless I can assemble it myself from abundant bits n pieces bought at an asian computer market. It has to be *that* commodity. Really ticks me off that Apple charges so much for their hardware. That doesn’t sit well with me. No competition in the hardware space is always bad news for the buyer.

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No competition in the hardware space is what keeps me buying macs. Competition in the hardware space drives down the QUALITY of parts, since the consumers don’t have a clue that the $40 they’re spending at an asian market is buying them a piece of hardware that will most likely fail in a week.

My Apple IIe STILL runs (bought it in 1983). My PowerMac 6100/60 still runs fine. My PowerComputing machines both died miserable deaths, and so has every single PC I ever purchased as a whole, or assembled myself. Had I bought quality parts, it would have cost me the same as a mac, and I would have had to build it myself.

Dells, Gateways, Compaqs – I’ve dealt with them all in the workplace and they’re made of crap hardware, due to price pressure from those wonderfully cheap asian markets.

I’m all for Apple making their own stuff. I never had a hardware issue with an apple product.